Bright Lights, Big City

Five, six, seven, eight . . .

When the hit “Chicago” revival opens tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, Jasmine Guy will begin the countdown to her last show. After being on the road with it for more than a year, she’s leaving the tour.

Next stop for her will be an after-school, gang-prevention safe house in South-Central Los Angeles.

“I’m going back to teaching--immediately,” says the sing-dancing-acting triple threat who portrays vaudeville-era murderer Velma Kelly in Kander and Ebb’s musical with as much panache as her acclaimed predecessors, 1997 Tony Award-winner Bebe Neuwirth and 1976 Tony nominee Chita Rivera, who originated the role.

“I’ll be teaching [dance] at A Place Called Home,” the lithe, muscular star added. “Then I’ll probably go away for a while.”

To judge by one of her consummate Los Angeles performances last week at the Ahmanson Theatre, where “Chicago” has just ended a 12-week run, you’d never guess that she wanted a breather, needed a vacation or had any ambition but the limelight.

In fact, Guy, 34--perhaps best known for playing the highfalutin Whitley Gilbert on “The Cosby Show” spinoff sitcom “A Different World” during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s--started the dance program at the safe house and helps finance its teaching staff of four.

“Dance is probably the best program we have going here,” said community activist Debrah Constance, who founded A Place Called Home in 1993. “You can really see the children change. It’s unbelievable.”

The organization serves almost 400 children a day, she said.

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Guy remembers her own teachers well. “I had very dedicated teachers in my life,” she said in a recent interview at the Ahmanson. “A lot of work went into the creation of ‘Jasmine Guy.’ I can remember the extra time they took with me, the conversations we had.

“When I work with young people, I see the neglect that they experience,” she continued. “They don’t even know that they’re being neglected. It makes me that much more thankful for the teachers who took hold and helped me.”

Sitting on a sofa in her dressing room, Guy, a Boston native, recalled growing up from age 6 in Portchester, N.Y., where she began taking dance lessons, and moving to Atlanta at 12 with her parents and younger sister. Both parents--her church minister father, who is black, and mother, a former high school teacher who is white--encouraged her “artistic side,” she said.

Guy set her sights on becoming an Alvin Ailey dancer--”I fell in love with the repertory”--and reached that goal upon graduation from high school, sooner than she or the New York company had anticipated.

“I’d had a scholarship to Alvin Ailey in the 11th grade,” Guy said. “If I hadn’t had that, I couldn’t have gone to New York. I was too young. My parents would never have let me go without a definitive plan. It wasn’t a fling. I’d been working toward that all my life.”

Dancing with two different Ailey companies for four years during the early ‘80s, she says, “was the most demanding and gratifying thing, artistically, that I’ve ever done.” Everywhere she looked, she saw “magnificence in the work.”

Nervous about the security of a dance career, Guy got into movies (Spike Lee’s “School Daze” in 1988 and Eddie Murphy’s “Harlem Nights” in 1989), recording (a 1990 Warner Bros. album titled “Jasmine”), television (guest roles on “Melrose Place,” “N.Y.P.D. Blue” “Touched by an Angel”) and musical theater, both on and off Broadway (“The Wiz,” “Bubbling Brown Sugar,” “Leader of the Pack,” “Beehive,” “Grease”).

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But until “Chicago,” she noted, all her artistic skills “had been kind of compartmentalized. I did one thing at a time. This brings everything together--the drama, the comedy, the dancing, the music. I like that. It kind of uses all my instruments and lets me work to my fullest capacity that way.”

Guy calls the show “a performer’s vehicle.” Presented like a revue, on a spare stage without scenery, it has been choreographed by Ann Reinking in the style of Bob Fosse, who choreographed and directed the original 1975 production (with lumbering, realistic sets).

“It’s very stark now, very cool,” she said. “I think it makes the audience listen. You’re not spoon-fed the plot of the story. You have to listen to the lyrics and take in the dance numbers because there’s information in the razzle-dazzle.”

Guy especially loves the revival’s shorthand: “We don’t say something in a scene and then have a song about what we just said. We heard that you love him. Let’s move on. This show actually uses the songs to tell the story. They’re like monologues.”

As Velma, a killer awaiting trial who hopes to turn her notoriety into vaudeville stardom, Guy finds herself being upstaged by Roxie Hart. Roxie (played by Christine D’Amboise at the Ahmanson and to be played here by Belle Calaway) has shot and killed her faithless lover and gets her faithful husband, Amos, to take the blame. (When he balks, Roxie is thrown into the Cook County clink and grabs all the headlines.)

“The show is very witty in the way it’s written to make these women lovable murderers,” Guy said. “They’ve both committed really despicable crimes. They’re not defending themselves. This is a musical, but it’s dark and sardonic, a kind of black comedy.”

It is, moreover, “an indictment of all of us,” she added, “of our ‘celebrity-ism,’ of the animal of the media, how it’s manipulated and how we’re manipulated by it.”

Depending on where she’s working, Guy, who is single, divides her time between Los Angeles and New York. She wants to get another record deal--she left Warner Bros. three years ago--before completing a new album. She has “about half the material.”

She’s also looking to write a one-woman show for herself, a la Jennifer Lewis, whose serial cabaret act (“Diva on the Couch,” “Diva Is Dismissed”) has been a hit.

“I wrote four episodes for ‘A Different World,’ and I’ve done three quarters of a screenplay,” Guy said. “I guess everybody and their momma has done that. But I wrote every day for, like, seven years. I have stacks of journals and poetry and short stories. Then I stopped and never wrote since. Isn’t that awful? It was, like, ‘Enough! I’ve got to live now.’ And I never looked back.

“I was just saying the other day, ‘I don’t want to be 22 again.’ I don’t want to look at my body that way again. I don’t want to think of myself in those terms again. I’m much happier now. I’m much calmer inside, less fearful and more faithful. I think it was always a struggle to be faithful when I was younger.”

Faithful to what?

“To myself. To my work. I’ve had time to see that things are going to be OK.”

Guy pauses to tap the wood coffee table. Her smile is incandescent.

“When you’re young, you feel like you’re going to die. You feel, ‘I’m a failure. I don’t know anything. I won’t survive.’ I’m glad that’s over.”

She knocks wood again.

* “Chicago” opens tonight and runs through Sunday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Performances are today-Friday 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. $21-$52.50. (714) 556-2787.